Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 2: Sky Burial, Mostly Persian

This blog
post is a preliminary sketch of what and when medieval Western Europe (hereafter,
for simplicity’s sake, “medieval” or “medieval people”) would have known about
funerary practices of exposing bodies to be eaten by dogs or birds (i.e., “sky
burial”). I’m concentrating on classical and late antique texts, saving John
Mandeville for the next post.

Again, I’ll stress that embryonic character of this post,
despite its great length: I have a hunch where thick footnotes are needed, and
slightly dimmer hunches about where I might be wrong. If you’re at all in the
vicinity of offering a “well, actually,” don’t hesitate.

If they
could, medieval people tended to bury their dead, flesh still on bone, ideally near
some a church, a shrine, or some other holy site. This habit of fleshy inhumation
has a distant analog in ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, where burial
is needed to give the spirit rest, to provide continuing rites of care,
especially for the sake of family or the larger community, which constituted
itself by seeding the ground with its dead, suffusing a place with memory (Walton, 317, and of course Peter Brown). As in these ancient worlds, shrines,
churches, and the blessed dead were the hearts of any medieval community worth
a Fodor’s Guide.

That said, for
a medieval Christian, practices like this could be, technically, unnecessary:
Augustine of Hippo’s On the Care of the
Dead (late fourth century) argues that the dead, as a rule, have no
knowledge of goings-on in the mortal world, and, furthermore, that they (and
their corpses) are past all harm or human benefit. Heartbreakingly, at least
for those of us bereft of beloved parents, Augustine says that if the dead knew our world, then his
mother would come and comfort him; but they don’t, so she doesn’t (16).
For all this, Augustine allows that the dead, or at least their bodies,
can be cared for: he reasons that care in burial and prayer at well-situated
gravesites, though probably of no benefit to the dead themselves, still can witness to Christian belief in the bodily resurrection, encourage bodily training of piety (Althusser
avant la lettre) and also comfort us, because we ourselves are also
creatures of flesh. Measured and thoughtful care of the dead have some use.

Augustine’s
cautious approach to funeral rites were clearly overshot in
medieval Europe. There, elaborate inhumation, memorial rites, and a whole industry
of pleading for intervention from the holy dead became nearly as common as
human death itself.

In this
culture, exposure was a horror. We all know about the “beasts of battle” of
Germanic poetry, the eagles, ravens, and wolves that eat the unburied corpses
of the dead. In the Song of Roland, as
the Battle of Roncesvalles sours for the Christians, Turpin begs Roland to blow
the horn and summon Charlemagne; while they’re all certain to die before rescue
arrives, at least the Emperor can take their bodies away and bury them in
churches, where “neither wolf nor pig nor dog will eat of us” (1750; “N'en
mangerunt ne lu ne porc ne chen”; trans. from Gilbert). Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis, itself an adaptation from the last tale of Boccaccio’s
Decameron, allows its heroine to
register a complaint when she’s certain her children are being taken away to be
killed: “I ask you one thing: take care that wild beasts or birds do not
mutilate this little body, unless you are commanded to the contrary” (Unum queso:
cura ne corpusculum [mark the anguish of that “little body”]hoc fere
lacerent aut volucres, ita tamen nisi contrarium sit preceptum; trans and text
from Sources and Analogues I.121; in the medieval French, “Je te prie, toutesfoiz…que
tu gardes a ton povoir que les bestes sauvaiges ne devourent ou menguent le
corps de cest enfant, se le contraire ne t’est enjoin”; in the English poet, ll. 567-72). And the Apocalypse of St John,
last book of the Christian scriptures, features birds invited to “the great
supper of God” [cenam magnam Dei], to feast upon the soldiers and horses of the
army of the Beast: this is clearly a humiliation, at least for the dead (for
the birds, it is something better: more on that in a later blog post). No one
would willingly allow the corpse of anyone they loved to be exposed like this.

Nonetheless,
at least from Herodotus (fifth century BCE), Europeans knew about still another
funerary practice, which stretched from the Caspian Sea and Caucasus through
Mesopotamia and perhaps even as far as the Indus, and, as I’ll write in next
time, when I finally take on Heidegger, eventually up to Tibet.

They found
this practice alternately repulsive, barbaric, antiquated, but also, in some
instances, of most interest to me, another way to mourn, no less valid than
fleshly inhumation. Knowledge of these practices not only connected medieval
people to a wider cultural world, doing much to help themselves imagine
themselves in light of another’s word; as I will argue in a later post, they
also provided a way for medieval people to imagine themselves and their bodies
differently, by recognizing that bodies could be given over as flesh to large
carnivores, not just worms, but without abandoning mourning. Exposure need not
be humiliation, and being consumed need not be done in secret, in the grave.
Here, in this open consumption, was a place for medievals to recognize that our
bodies could be material flesh and our
bodies at the same time: as I will argue in an upcoming post, this was
material recognition of the way all flesh, all bodies, belong to the world at
large and ourselves at the same time. A material reduction (we are flesh) can
continue to acknowledge our emotional connection to the particularity of our
bodies and the bodies of our loved ones (we are beloved flesh).

This post,
however, will mainly be devoted only to what the medievals could have known.
Evilmerodach and Odoric of Pordenone (especially as transmitted by the Book of John Mandeville) were enormously
popular in the later Middle Ages. But what about the earlier period?

The oldest
potential references to “sky burial” may be those depicted in an obelisk carving
at Göbekli Tepe (or Göbeklitepe) and paintings at Çatal Höyü (or Çatalhöyük),
both in modern-day Turkey (thank you to Kathleen Kennedy for
turning me on to these!), which each feature vultures soaring over or fluttering about headless
human corpses. I make no claims that memories of these astonishingly ancient cultures reached to the Middle Ages or even to the classical world: each site was
occupied for some 2000 years (itself no small time!), the former abandoned about 10,000 years ago, the
latter 7,000, and therefore at the most recent more temporally distant from
Herodotus (d. 425 BCE) than we are, now, from the invention of writing (c. 3500 BCE).

Testart p 35

And what some think
to be sky burial in fact may be only depictions of
military victories, with the headless corpses of the vanquished left to be
eaten by vultures, and the skulls taken as trophies, or so argues the, it must
be said, appropriately named Alain Testart in “Des crânes et des vautours ou la
guerre oubliée” (“On
Skulls and Vultures, or, The Forgotten War”). We will let that rest, then, and
return to what I suspect may be our most ancient, incontrovertible reference to
sky burial, from Herodotus.

But there
are other matters concerning the dead which are secretly and obscurely
told--how the dead bodies of Persians are not buried before they have been
mangled [without my knowing Greek: ἑλκυσθῇ, to drag, draw, or tear in pieces] by bird or dog. That this is the way
of the Magians I know for a certainty; for they do not conceal the practice.
But this is certain, that before the Persians bury the body in earth they
embalm it in wax (Godley trans, Loeb, Vol 1, I.140, p 179).

Strabo’s Geography (before 23 CE) is more assured
that Herodotus, though perhaps no more accurate. He writes that the Persians
“smear the bodies of the dead with wax before they bury them, though they do
not bury the Magi but leave their bodies to be eaten by birds,” adding what
became a common charge that “these Magi, by ancestral custom, consort even with
their mothers” (XV.iii.20). Elsewhere (XI.xi.8, V, p. 293 in Loeb trans), Strabo explains
that the Caspians starve and expose those over 70 years old, abandoning them on
(or strapping them to?) desert biers, watching from a distance, and considering
them blessed if – and only if – these hapless elderly are attacked by wild dogs or birds. Very Mad Max. And, citing Onesicritus, a historian who embedded with Alexander the Great, Strabo imagines
that the Bactrians keep dogs expressly to kill their aged and sick, adding a
description that, in essence, imagines the Bactrian cities as necropoles:

While the
land outside the walls of the metropolis of the Bactrians look clean, yet most
of the land inside the walls is full of human bones (XI.xi.3, V, p. 282-83 in
the Loeb).

To me at
least, further examples are shockingly plentiful: in what might be
chronological order, from 45 BCE to the third century CE, Persian sky burial
shows up in Cicero’s stoic Tusculan
Disputations (I.xlv); Plutarch’s Moralia
(499, Vol VI p 371 in Loeb, where he says Hrycanians do it with dogs, Bactrians
with birds); Sextus Empiricus’s skeptic Outlines
of Pyrrhonism (III.227); Justin’s Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus (XLI.iii); Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers (IX, on Pyrrho); and Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals (IV.21). Christian examples, in a list that
may be just as non-exhaustive, include the Book
of the Law of the Countries, written by pupils of the Syriac gnostic Bardesanes (d. 222; in Syrian, Bar Dayṣān; one translation here: search for “In the whole of Media”); the Recognitions of pseudo-Clementine (IX.25); and Eusebius’s Preparation for
the Gospel (I.iv, search for “And of the benefit
which visibly proceeds”). And, finally, the source that first led me down this
path, Jerome’s Against Jovinian (II.vii), where he writes:

The Tibareni
crucify those whom they have loved before when they have grown old. The Hyrcani
throw them out half alive to the birds and dogs: the Caspians leave them dead
for the same beasts. The Scythians bury alive with the remains of the dead
those who were beloved of the deceased. The Bactrians throw their old men to
dogs which they rear for the very purpose, and when Stasanor, Alexander's
general, wished to correct the practice, he almost lost his province (a point
Jerome gets from Porphyry).

Some writers
(Herodotus and Justin) – or, I might say, some genres –present themselves as simply doing ethnography, only
listing customs, as they might list geographical features. Strabo is horrified,
at least by the Bactrians. Porphyry is horrified too, although his conclusions may
surprise: yes, some people are meat-eaters, or parent-eaters, or
parent-exposers, but at least we philosophers need not behave like this. And Eusebius
anticipates the colonial missionaries of modernity, when he argues that the conversion
to Christianity corrects these terrible practices (the pagans no longer “expose
their dead kindred to dogs and birds….For these and numberless things akin to
these were what of old made havoc of human life”), so that Christian conversion
is, for any culture, and not only Jews (more frequently targeted as
culturally anachronistic), an emergence out of a muddled past into a neat, correct, universal
civilization.

Still, whether in philosophic or many of these religious texts, the most frequent reason
for these ancient writers to cite sky burial (and its associated practice that
we might call “sky euthanasia”) is to pose as cosmopolitan admirers of the great
variety of human culture. Plutarch lists these and other practices (sati, for
example) to argue that virtue can resist chance's worst harms: Central Asians positively love to have their bodies exposed to beasts! Bardesanes’s students and
pseudo-Clementine alike use worldwide cultural heterogeneity to argue for human
freedom and against the compulsion of the stars. If stars had so much power,
human culture would be more easily classifiable, more homogeneous. But, says Book of the Law of the Countries, “the
truth is, that in all countries, every day, and at all hours, men are born
under Nativities diverse from one another, and the laws of men prevail over the
decree of the stars, and they are governed by their customs.”

In the hands
of other writers – Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, and even Jerome – we
have something similar to Pomponius Mela’s first-century Chorographia (II.9-12), namely – a curious, if often disgusted, appreciation of human difference in
what we might call (and no doubt has been called) the “cultural variation
topos.” Diogenes does it with admirable force:

The same
thing is regard by some as just and by others as unjust, or as good by some and
bad by others. Persians think it not unnatural for a man to marry his daughter;
to Greeks it is unlawful. The Massagetae…have their wives in common; the Greeks
have not. The Cilicians used to delight in piracy; not so the Greeks. Different
people believe in different gods; some in providence, others not. In burying
their dead, the Egyptians embalm them; the Romans burn them; the Paeonians
throw them into lakes.

Cicero Tusculan Disputations also merits
citation at length:

But why
should I notice the beliefs of individuals, since we may observe the varied
deceptions under which the races of mankind labour? The Egyptians embalm their
dead and keep them in the house; the Persians even smear them with wax before
burial, that the bodies may last for as long a time as possible; it is the custom
of the Magi not to bury the bodies of their dead unless they have been first
mangled by wild beasts [nisi a feris sint ante laniata]; in Hyrcania [no
surprise] the populace support dogs for the benefit of the community, while the
nobles keep them for family use: it is as we know a famous breed
[nobile...genus] of dogs, but in spite of the cost, each householder procures
them [translation modified] in proportion to his means, to mangle him
[lanietur], and that they consider the best mode of burial (Loeb, King
translation, p. 291, I.XLV).

I’m as yet
uncertain about the medieval afterlife of these points. To take two examples:
Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies accuses
Persians only of being fire-worshippers (XIV.iii.10), led to this error by “the
giant Nebroth,” and its several references to the ferocious Hyrcanians and
neighboring Scythians says nothing about the exposure of the elderly or the
dead to possible animal mangling or excarnation. Gregory of Tours, writing a
generation before Isidore, likewise calls the Persians only fire-worshippers (History of the Franks, I.v), blaming
this, more correctly, on “Zoroastra.” Note also his annoyance (X.26) at the
appointment of a Syrian merchant, Eusebius, as bishop of Paris in 591, who
stuffed the household with other Syrians: some of them, I expect, might have
had more than passing knowledge of the customs of the Sassanids: and yet no
word from Gregory. Nor am I entirely sure, yet, about the survival of many of
my texts into the Middle Ages. Chaucerians know the afterlife of the more
misogynist passages of Jerome’s Against
Jovinian, and I know the text as a whole survived, as we see from this
twelfth-century copy.

But quick searches of the Patrologia Latina and the Monumenta
Germaniae Historica suggest that Jerome’s ethnographic musings may not have
been much talked about.

More
research is needed! The next post – here perhaps before next Friday – will be
on Mandeville, and, if there’s room, against Heidegger and on the ecocritical
and affective implications of all this. Hang out, hang on!

Thanks for that and thanks for reading! - there's an even LONGER post coming in the next few days on the reception of sky burial in late medieval Europe.

Glad to see your post, too: I'll add there that one complication, which I don't doubt that you've thought of elsewhere, is that what's called the "cloud" in computing is always just someone else's "computer." This material coming to ground of metaphor in off-site storage, always material, always out of our control, might be something to exploit further in your thoughts on cyborgs and sky burial.